What is HTTP?

HTTP- Hypertext transfer protocol is a distributed, cooperative and hypermedia information system application layer protocol. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.

The original purpose of designing HTTP was to provide a way to publish and receive HTML pages. Resources requested through the HTTP or HTTPS protocol are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

The development of HTTP was initiated by Tim Bernez-Lee in 1989 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). HTTP standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (World Wide Web Consortium,W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force to coordinate (Internet Engineering Task Force, IETF), finally issued a series of RFC, most famous of which is published in June 1999 RFC 2616 defines a version of the HTTP protocol that is widely used today - HTTP 1.1.

In December 2014, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis httpbis working group submitted the HTTP/2 standard proposal to the IESG for discussion, which was approved on February 17, 2015.

The HTTP/2 standard was officially released on May 2015 as RFC 7540, replacing HTTP 1.1 as the implementation standard for HTTP.

Overview of HTTP Hypertext transfer protocol →

HTTP is a standard for requesting and responding between a client (user) and a server (website), usually using the TCP protocol.

Using a web browser, web crawler, or another tool, the client initiates an HTTP request to the specified port on the server (the default port is 80). We call this client a user agent. Some resources, such as HTML files and images, are stored on the responding server.

We call this answering server the origin server. There may be multiple "middle tiers" between the user agent and the source server, such as proxy servers, gateways, or tunnels.

Although the TCP/IP protocol is the most popular application on the Internet, there is no layer in the HTTP protocol that it must use or support. In fact, HTTP can be implemented on any internet protocol or other networks.

HTTP assumes that its underlying protocols provide reliable transport. Therefore, any protocol that can provide such guarantees can be used by it, so it uses TCP as its transport layer in the TCP/IP protocol suite.